To paraphrase the hiker’s saying “regret is mandatory, suffering is optional”. What you describe as not feeling regret to me sounds like feeling regret but not suffering because of it. Knowing that you could have made a better choice is an act of feeling regret for the choice you did make. Suffering as a result of it is bad for you (it’s suffering, after all), and it sounds like you don’t suffer when you regret. This is a good place to be! It’s good to both recognize that there were better possibilities, and maybe you can aspire to pick better next time, but maybe you did ultimately do as good as you could have done in that situation, so beating yourself up wouldn’t be useful.
We may disagree on the semantics of the word regret, so imagine I’m saying regret_{alex} for my version, and regret_{gordon} for your version.
Knowing that you could have made a better choice is an act of feeling regret for the choice you did make.
I dispute the claim that regret is mandatory in most senses of the word.
I’m specifically saying that I could not have made a better choice because I already made the best possible choice given the circumstances, so there is nothing to regret other than the sort of “regret” that I did not counterfactually maximize expected value.
Behind this claim about regret is another: the universe is subjectively deterministic (the universe looks deterministic from the view point of an observer, and any appearance otherwise is due to uncertainty rather than free will or randomness). This claim allows us to avoid making any metaphysical (and thus unprovable) claims like that the universe is really deterministic, that free will exists, or that counterfactuals are real (as opposed to constructs to support the reckoning of causation).
This… seems like it’s not engaging with what regret is for?
Like, there is definitely a sense in which everything is deterministic. But, like, the point of regret is to learn and do different things in the future.
I’m a bit surprised at your viewpoint here given other things I knew about you, though, and not sure if I’m missing something.
My motivation with these comments is to push back against claims that regret is necessary or mandatory. I agree that regret is pretty useful for most people, and I wouldn’t recommend they give it up unless it just falls away (and insert obvious caveat about psycho/sociopaths). But I also think it’s worth knowing that feeling regret is not necessary to live a fulfilling life, because not knowing that it’s not necessary creates a roadblock where people cling to their regret long past their need for it.
It might help to say a bit more about what my experience of regret is. It used to be a feeling, like a burning sensation of fear and anxiety, like the fear that I’ll be abandoned by friends and family for screwing up. Now, after doing a bunch of meditation and other stuff to come to terms with the world as it is, I see regret like a negative number on a spreadsheet: useful information to update and act. This is different enough of an experience that I think it’s better not to call it regret, since that seems likely to lead to more confusion, since I think most people have strong associations with what the feeling of regret is like rather than what the accounting to regret is like.
It might also help to know that I see regret as separate from remorse. Whereas regret, when felt, might be taboo’d as “clinging to counterfactuals” in its various forms, remorse is more like sadness that the world is as it is and that my best did not produce a better outcome. It’d take a lot of equanimity not to feel remorse, but it takes surprisingly little equanimity to not feel regret.
Heh, I think this is the opposite of our respective roles in our previous conversation about trauma. (Where you were like “I tend to think of trauma as things that happened in the past that led to stuck memories that are strongly immune to updating.” and I was like “that seems different enough from standard usage you should probably find a new word?)
So, I’m pretty open to the “regret is different enough for most people than how I’m describing it that I should have a new word.” But, I also personally have thought of regret as fairly straightforwardly matching the way I described it. I don’t feel like I did much rationality-reimagining to end up with my description above. (i.e. most people might not say ‘the point of regret is to learn things for the future’, but I do think it sort of straightforwardly describes how people are using it’)
To paraphrase the hiker’s saying “regret is mandatory, suffering is optional”. What you describe as not feeling regret to me sounds like feeling regret but not suffering because of it. Knowing that you could have made a better choice is an act of feeling regret for the choice you did make. Suffering as a result of it is bad for you (it’s suffering, after all), and it sounds like you don’t suffer when you regret. This is a good place to be! It’s good to both recognize that there were better possibilities, and maybe you can aspire to pick better next time, but maybe you did ultimately do as good as you could have done in that situation, so beating yourself up wouldn’t be useful.
We may disagree on the semantics of the word regret, so imagine I’m saying regret_{alex} for my version, and regret_{gordon} for your version.
I dispute the claim that regret is mandatory in most senses of the word.
I’m specifically saying that I could not have made a better choice because I already made the best possible choice given the circumstances, so there is nothing to regret other than the sort of “regret” that I did not counterfactually maximize expected value.
Behind this claim about regret is another: the universe is subjectively deterministic (the universe looks deterministic from the view point of an observer, and any appearance otherwise is due to uncertainty rather than free will or randomness). This claim allows us to avoid making any metaphysical (and thus unprovable) claims like that the universe is really deterministic, that free will exists, or that counterfactuals are real (as opposed to constructs to support the reckoning of causation).
This… seems like it’s not engaging with what regret is for?
Like, there is definitely a sense in which everything is deterministic. But, like, the point of regret is to learn and do different things in the future.
I’m a bit surprised at your viewpoint here given other things I knew about you, though, and not sure if I’m missing something.
My motivation with these comments is to push back against claims that regret is necessary or mandatory. I agree that regret is pretty useful for most people, and I wouldn’t recommend they give it up unless it just falls away (and insert obvious caveat about psycho/sociopaths). But I also think it’s worth knowing that feeling regret is not necessary to live a fulfilling life, because not knowing that it’s not necessary creates a roadblock where people cling to their regret long past their need for it.
It might help to say a bit more about what my experience of regret is. It used to be a feeling, like a burning sensation of fear and anxiety, like the fear that I’ll be abandoned by friends and family for screwing up. Now, after doing a bunch of meditation and other stuff to come to terms with the world as it is, I see regret like a negative number on a spreadsheet: useful information to update and act. This is different enough of an experience that I think it’s better not to call it regret, since that seems likely to lead to more confusion, since I think most people have strong associations with what the feeling of regret is like rather than what the accounting to regret is like.
It might also help to know that I see regret as separate from remorse. Whereas regret, when felt, might be taboo’d as “clinging to counterfactuals” in its various forms, remorse is more like sadness that the world is as it is and that my best did not produce a better outcome. It’d take a lot of equanimity not to feel remorse, but it takes surprisingly little equanimity to not feel regret.
Heh, I think this is the opposite of our respective roles in our previous conversation about trauma. (Where you were like “I tend to think of trauma as things that happened in the past that led to stuck memories that are strongly immune to updating.” and I was like “that seems different enough from standard usage you should probably find a new word?)
So, I’m pretty open to the “regret is different enough for most people than how I’m describing it that I should have a new word.” But, I also personally have thought of regret as fairly straightforwardly matching the way I described it. I don’t feel like I did much rationality-reimagining to end up with my description above. (i.e. most people might not say ‘the point of regret is to learn things for the future’, but I do think it sort of straightforwardly describes how people are using it’)